Frantz Fanon: A Life (review)

Born in Martinique in 1925, Frantz Fanon studied medicine in France. He became a psychiatrist and served a residency in Algeria before joining the Algerian Nationalist movement. This Martinican psychiatrist-turned-Algerian revolutionary and freedom fighter is one of the most prominent and powerful black voices of all time. Of all the ideas associated with him, it is those on race, colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, and Third World revolution that are most significant. His work has profoundly altered the landscape of contemporary revolutionary thought and continues to problematize and contradicts many of our taken-for-granted convictions about contemporary politics as a whole. Fanon is best known for TheWretched of the Earth, a book that is considered by many to be the ideological blueprint and political manifesto for an African Third-World Revolution.

In Frantz Fanon: A Life, David Macey describes Fanon as a man whose "commitment to Algeria and to his own vision of African unity was total" (415). Simultaneously, however, according to Macey, Fanon often demonstrated a "lack of both political judgement and political experience"(415). The main objective of Macey's biography is the unraveling of the complex nature of the identity of a man who became an object of criticism in his lifetime for the radical and contentious nature of his writing. Demonstrating that there was often a "considerable discrepancy between what he said or endorsed in public" (355), Macey re-examines the status of Fanon as a dominant figure in the iconography of Third World nationalism. According to Macey, Fanon might have had an emotionally charged personality, but his "political views were [. . .] a product of his own anger and a spontaneous sympathy with the 'wretched of the earth' rather than any interest in party politics" (124-25). Thus, Macey manages also to convey a compelling image of Fanon as an iconoclast. Fanon the man was also, however, an individual who, despite being full of "humanist solidarity" (203) for Algeria, was alienated from his adopted country. This was tragic for one who stated that Martinique was "out of the question" (203) when it came to applying for a job after he had qualified as a psychiatrist. The biography situates Fanon's writing within the changing contexts of life and his work: his childhood in Martinique; his career at the psychiatric hospital at Blida in Algeria; his experiences in the French army; and his participation in the Algerian revolution. Fanon's work in exile in Tunisia and his gradual transformation into an international spokesman for the FLN are revealed as the highlights of his career as an ideologue of Algerian nationalism. The chapter entitled "Exile" is particularly informative about his combined roles of practitioner of psychiatry and freedom fighter and revolutionary.

Dispelling myths that include the view of Fanon as "the apostle of violence" and "the prophet of a violent Third World revolution that posed an even greater threat to the West than communism" (2), Macey contends that [a] lthough existing images of Fanon are "by no means inaccurate," they are "very partial" (2). He marshals evidence to demonstrate that "Fanon proved to have a personal horror of violence" (461), thus affirming that "[t] here were other Frantz Fanons" (2): "The Fanon who advocated the use of violence in his Les Damnés de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth], which was published as he lay dying far from Algeria," his adopted country, Macey points out, "was the product of the most bloody of France's wars of decolonisation" (2). Macey gives an insight into the horrors and atrocities of the Algerian war of liberation, atrocities committed on both sides of the conflict but largely by the functionaries of French colonialism. Of equal concern, though, is the Algerian FLN's "brutality to its own people" (353) despite its determination "to be presented as the guide and guardian of the revolution" (353). The uninformed reader learns that "many...